


Lattice

by odoridango



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Cohabitation, Cursed!Eren, Folktale-esque, M/M, Magic!Jean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 11:05:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3848617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cursed boy arrives on Jean the Weaver's doorstep, to ask if protection can be woven for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lattice

**Author's Note:**

> For Erejean week Day 6: magic - shot for a folktale-y feel, but not sure if I quite made it.

Past the glacial planes of the north, beyond the deserts to the west, even further than the steppes and plains that sprawled in the wake of cliffs and canyons, was a land of lush, fallow farmland and rolling green hills. In that land, was a town, pushed up close to the outcroppings of the local mountains. 

Jean the Weaver lived in that town. No one knew quite how he had gotten his start, but all Jean had done was simply wake up one day with an itch in his hands, and a restlessness in his heart. Even though the children liked to say that he shut himself in his workshop because he was only human at night, the truth was that Jean the Weaver was a seventeen year old boy just like any other. 

His job, as his title said, was to weave. He wove with reeds, he knitted, he crocheted, he would sit hours upon hours on the seat of his loom without food or rest to create the most lavish patterns, ones that seemed to blossom from nowhere and inspire deep feeling in whomever looked upon them. His mother would visit him in his workshop two times a day to check in on him, for Jean’s slumber was irregular, and came and went as it wished, not always allowing him to provision himself as much as he would like. 

Some called Jean a witch. They weren’t wrong. For all intents and purposes, Jean was a witch, a weaving witch, and while some of his customers and patrons never seemed to understand that, others did. His threads were his scripts, his patterns were his incantations. Different materials took well to different purposes, and the dyes that he made from plants on the nearby hills made another layer of spell complexity on his creations. All sorts of people from the region would come to seek his wares, and it was customary for him to be the one to create special woven capes or rugs for not only those who appreciated their aesthetic beauty, but also those who came for the magic woven into them, spells of protection, spells that wished for health, or granted prosperity. For some parts of the town, Jean’s small, square patches were standard household items, hung at the door to ward off any of the monsters and ill wishes that tried to force themselves in. 

One day there was a peculiar knock at his door, a very solid one, and the stranger knocked twice more. Jean bid them to come in, and in the entryway stood a boy his age, just a few inches shorter than Jean himself. Green-eyed and brown-haired, dressed in plain clothes and covered in bandages and scratches, the boy did not seem to be particularly well. 

“What do you want,” Jean the Weaver demanded, looking up only briefly from the coil of yarn pooling about his feet. 

“I’m cursed,” the boy said, jaw squared, fists clenched by his sides defiantly. 

The boy’s name was Eren, and early on in life he had been cursed to be a cause of trouble. Accidents frequently happened around him with no veritable explanation, and it had made it difficult for him to hold a job and help keep his family afloat. It was some ancestor who had incurred the curse, one of those finicky, intergenerational deals whose origins and patterns were just so difficult to track, and Eren’s father had admitted that his father before him had died an early, and very messy, death. 

Eren had worked many jobs, and had either been fired, or had excused himself from most of them. In the bakery, a bag of flour had blown open while he was inside the lantern-lit storage room, and Eren had been forced to rush the customers and coworkers out of the shop before it had gone up in a plume of orange flame and wicked smoke. As a store clerk he had been held at knife point, only saved by the martial techniques a girl in his hometown had taught him, and even when he was delivering post, he narrowly missed being trampled by a herd of panicked horses. Working at the seamstress’ ended with him being stalked about by a strange woman who owned the local cabinet of curiosities, and her odd obsession with his eyes had caused him to flee under cover of night, when the killings had begun, inspiring the police to chase him. They’d arrested him, and he would have been transferred to the prisons had the woman, a lowly officer’s cousin, not attacked him during his detainment. 

All of Eren’s stories continued in such a way, and his travels had brought him to Jean’s town, particularly the granite quarry next door. He knew it would be dangerous work, but he had to eat, and he had to send money home. So he took it on, but days before the machinery had malfunctioned, and he had almost lost his arm. Ten coworkers had almost lost their lives. 

“I’m lucky, too,” Eren said grimly, and the thick scar that ran across the place where his right arm attached to his body gleamed sickly under the light. “But I need help. When I came here, I heard about you. Jean the Weaver.” 

“I take things by commission,” Jean said, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t make something anyway, but he hadn’t come across so many curses in his lifetime. His was a quiet, out of the way town, and he’d expected to simply be a local producer for the rest of his life. But he remembered Eren’s peculiar knock, how resonant it had been, and he found within himself the urge to push back, against the curse, and against Eren himself. It was a foreign feeling, being challenged. 

“I can’t pay, but I can work,” Eren said, and Jean knew that too, because his hands were thick and steady, forearms reliable, and Eren had the scars of hard work carved into his body, alongside all his other old wounds and hurts. 

So it was that Eren became Jean the Weaver’s new housemate. It had been a while since Eren had lived in such comfortable settings, and Jean found himself laughing more in the next several days than he did in an entire month. Jean’s mother was pleased at the new development, and took Eren aside. 

“Jean has given his family a comfortable life,” she said, “My work alone would not be worth so much. But many times, people have told me that his power is frightening. That is why he lives here, near the mountain, far from the village. To protect himself.” 

Her hands had closed around his like a prayer, and Eren had understood. 

They worked quietly, together. Jean at his loom, or in his knitting chair, click-click-clicking away with hands deft and sure, never missing a stitch, and now also, Eren watching him quietly in the corner spinning threads, the quiet creaking of the old spinning wheel filling the room. People came and went, and Eren helped shear local sheep for their wool, Eren prepared food for them to eat, Eren watched beautiful tapestries and charms flow into being before his eyes, and thought silently that Jean the Weaver was not just a story after all, Jean the Weaver was something, someone who was real, who had bedhead in the mornings, and a penchant for the lavender butter his mother made him. 

Eren understood that his was becoming a large project, and there were days when he woke to find Jean harried and half-asleep, fingers working tirelessly though the rest of him seemed to droop. Colors, yarns of all types were tested, but Eren’s protection remained elusive. 

“A cape,” Jean described, panting, as Eren poured water into his mouth carefully. Jean’s trances were difficult and frequent, and he tried to trace the shape of Eren’s protection in the air with shaky hands. “Greens and blues. Colors of water, for fluidity, flexibility in all situations. Streaks of red, as a reminder of your scars, the necessity of it. Colors, Eren, you are full of colors.” 

Eren didn’t say that he hadn’t had an accident since he had come to live with Jean, didn’t tell Jean of the theories his mind had produced as he had stared up at the ceiling in the night, listening to Jean working tirelessly in the main room, meditating to the rhythms of Jean’s threads. 

Months passed, and still, Eren was the Weaver’s helper. The locals had begun to call him the Weaver’s Apprentice, though he was nothing of the sort. They learned his name, greeted him when he showed them in the workshop door, and Eren had never had such a peaceful several months. But Jean, he knew was in turmoil, confused and unsure of why he couldn’t find Eren’s pattern, Eren’s weave. His power had never failed him before, and his anger filled the room, drove him to work with the reeds that would bend easily with his mood, leaving a scattered trail of odd, twisting sculptures behind him, baskets made with holes in their middles. 

Coming out of a trance, Jean grasped Eren’s face between his palms suddenly, startling him enough that Eren dropped the light supper of fruits, nuts and yogurt that he had brought Jean. The threads of the loom glistened red, and that was rare, for there to be a tapestry with so much red in it, but there was red on the wood too, where the threads had woven so tightly Jean’s fingers had borne the brunt of the wear. 

Jean brought him close, temples beaded with sweat, eyelashes fluttering in his delirium, and Eren felt the rush of Jean’s breath across his mouth as he spoke, so close that he could almost feel the movement of Jean’s lips. 

“Where are your colors,” he almost snarled, fingers frantic over Eren’s face, smoothing back his hair, sweeping over the apples of his cheeks, fluttering across his mouth and the nape of his neck. “Where is your pattern. Eren,” he said, and it was like a plea as he stroked Eren’s jaw, “Eren, where are you?” 

And Eren raised his own hands, traced lightly, slowly, up the inside of Jean’s arms, across the juncture of elbow, to the thin skin of his wrists, settled a gentle grip over Jean’s hands, those beloved hands, brought them to his breast to cover his heart, and came even closer, so Jean could feel Eren’s words on his skin, so his body, his magic could understand what Eren had been keeping to himself for months, waiting for the weaving to complete itself, waiting for the threads to come together and bind, tight. 

“A secret for you, Jean the Weaver,” he whispered to Jean’s marrow and bones. “You have had me in your home now for months, provided for me like your own.” He felt Jean’s body quake, felt mesmerized by the power that seemed to leech into him, the undeniable response of Jean’s magic to his words, and the unconscious acknowledgement implicit in it. Jean’s hands smoothed over his shoulderblades, over his back. They traced up the side of his face, and Eren moved with those hands like he was just another string to be slid in place, found himself looking into brown eyes, rich and fathomless, near lip to lip with parted mouth, and Eren felt like he were bursting with the colors that Jean said he held, something he hadn’t really understood until now. He ducked down, down, pressed lips to Jean’s jaw, trailed them the pulse point in the Weaver’s throat, to the quiver of heartsblood and magic that writhed under Jean’s skin. 

“And in turn, I made you sustenance,” he said, as if casting a spell, “I plucked the reeds, dried them in the garden, I sheared the sheep, and I spun the wool.” Jean’s hands were frantic and grasping, sliding everywhere, and his eyes were intent, red high on his cheeks feeding off the growing shortness of Eren’s breath, the energy he seemed to be stealing away. 

“You have been weaving with my raffia, my fibers, my thread,“ Eren gasped against Jean’s mouth as he was kissed, as Jean searched for the answer that he held inside of him, for the lack that Eren seemed to make up for. “So, Great Weaver, answer me this – where do you think my patterns have gone? Who do you think holds my colors?”

Exhausted, Jean laughed and laughed, clutching Eren tight against him, and as Eren smiled happily his eyes seemed to glow. Jean could see his magic there, lighting him up inside, woven in tight side by side with protection, to leave no room for tragedy, for misfortune. 

Not customer or traveler, not employee or apprentice. No, Eren was a Muse.


End file.
